Charlie Ashton, Director, Business Development, Wind River

It is commonplace within the global comms industry for practitioners to employ shorthand to describe various complex concepts. One such is using the letters 'NFV' as a sort of giant conceptual glove within which to catch all the various variations and subtleties of network virtualisation. However, as Charlie Ashton points out, 'NFV' is, necessarily, a fairly narrow and limited definition when compared to the much broader scope and blanket range of variables that are covered by the phrase 'network virtualisation'. The distinction is very important.